In the last episode (Dec 29), md+muttd@linux.it said:
> but than, i4ve wanted to view into my debian-devel-mbox mutt ran and
> ran -showing "sorting mail" (the swap-space decreased so i4ve added a
> swapfile) - after waiting about three hours i killed mutt (the
> processor ran idle)
>
> then i4ve tried it with another comp over nfs -- this time it worked
> without prob4s
>
> the mbox was about 90megs big
>
> the first comp. had 16mb ram, 32mb swap and 80 mb swapfile
>
> the second (nfs), had 64mb ram 64mb swap - no swapfile
>
> here4s my question:
>
> had this been a problem of mutt or only of resources??
Resources most likely. I've opened 100MB mailboxes before. The only
limit mutt has is the number of emails per mailbox, which is 65535
(unsigned short).
The "sorting mailbox" step takes so long because it's building threads.
If you sort by date instead of by thread, it won't take more than a
second or two to sort.
-Dan Nelson
dnelson@emsphone.com

On Tue, 29 Dec 1998, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Dec 29), md+muttd@linux.it said:
> > had this been a problem of mutt or only of resources??
> Resources most likely.
I'll second this. I made an ass of myself on linux-kernel a few
months back as I was experiencing processes running out of file
descriptors or just randomly ceasing to exist.
Turns out it was because I had installed lshell on my new Debian
system and it was setting some rather insane resource limits (eg,
"lets limit the user to 20 file descriptors per process" which worked
wonders with squid and netscape ;)
mutt would also occasionally just hang, usually when it had exhausted
the per-process memory resource limit (eg, a 20Mb+ linux-kernel
mailbox)
Cheers,
--
Matt

1998-12-29-15:24:32 Dan Nelson:
> Resources most likely. I've opened 100MB mailboxes before. The only
> limit mutt has is the number of emails per mailbox, which is 65535
> (unsigned short).
I just opened a 571MB mailbox, with 64,479 messages in it. Looks like I'm
gonna have to split that into two folders before too much longer!
It's a real shame that limit is set low enough that people can actually hit
it.
I'm gonna wait until mutt actually falls over first, of course, so I can hear
what the splat sounds like:-).
BTW, the mutt process that opened that folder climbed up to 47MB virtual, all
of which was active (i.e. real --- in the working set) at once, before it got
completely open. I use Maildir format, I dunno if mutt's memory use would be
significantly different with other mailbox folder styles.
This was done on an SS-5 with 96MB of real memory and c. 200MB of swap,
running Solaris 2.5.1 which means well over 250MB virtual available. Took
about 10 minutes to open the folder.
-Bennett

> Resources most likely. I've opened 100MB mailboxes before. The only
> limit mutt has is the number of emails per mailbox, which is 65535
> (unsigned short).
That limit was lifted a year ago around version 0.88. It now uses
"int" instead of "unsigned short". So the new limit is up to
2.147.483.647 messages on a 32-bit word machine, and a lot more on
a 64-bit word machine. Enough for a while, isn't it? :)
Regards,
- Byrial
P.S. You will probably meet another limit first: The file size of
mailboxes is limited by the size of a "long" which often is same as
an "int" (i.e. max. 2.147.483.647 bytes per mailbox).